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Sylvia Plath’s Blackberries

Once the announced ban on BlackBerry devices takes effect in October, folks in the United Arab Emirates and, it seems, in Saudi Arabia, will have to find new ways to exercise their thumbs and annoy their fellow elevator-riders. (Read Deirdre’s thoughtful commentary on the ban, and on privacy in the Web age more generally.) BlackBerry’s prominence in the news this week reminded me that unlike some of its modern brand cousins (Xerox, Google), it has yet to achieve transitive-verb status in the English language. No one is said to be “blackberrying” anything when they’re clacking away on those tiny keys.

Such a word would be absurd—no one “iPhones” anything, either—but it nonetheless has a significant literary pedigree, being the title of a poem by Sylvia Plath, published in the September 15th, 1962 issue of The New Yorker, and available in full-text from the Poetry Foundation. The poem’s first stanza contemplates the timeless act of berry picking; the only modern object is a bottle, emptied of milk:

Nobody in the lane, and nothing, nothing but blackberries, / Blackberries on either side, though on the right mainly, / A blackberry alley, going down in hooks, and a sea / Somewhere at the end of it, heaving. Blackberries / Big as the ball of my thumb, and dumb as eyes / Ebon in the hedges, fat / With blue-red juices. These they squander on my fingers. / I had not asked for such a blood sisterhood; they must love me. / They accommodate themselves to my milkbottle, flattening their sides.

“Blackberrying” is a poem of late summer, capturing a ripeness that edges deliriously close to rot. Its immediate concerns—the luminous colors in nature, the lazy buzzing of juice-besotted flies, and the far-off sounds of crashing waves—may be simpler than the mechanics or political consequences of international eavesdropping, but, to a city-bound reader dreaming of the bounties of rural life, they seem somehow weightier.

Note: For more on Plath from this era, check out the British Library’s recently released collection of recordings that Plath did for the BBC, including readings of several poems, and a joint interview she did with her husband, Ted Hughes.